Miniseries takes on tough topics in China

Envisioning a documentary miniseries about China, British filmmaker Jonathan Lewis wanted to avoid wagging his Western finger at the People's Republic.

His starting point, Lewis insisted, would not be one of looking down. Rather, this was going to be a project, he said, in which "I was going to listen more than I talked." And from the outset the Chinese government would know exactly what he was doing, having been presented with a film treatment that would look at some tough issues — religious freedoms, environmental problems, corruption within the Communist Party — and signing off on the project, assigning Lewis and his crew full-time "minders," of course.

Some 14 months of filming and $4 million later, the ambitious four-hour documentary miniseries, "China From The Inside," airs in two parts tonight and next Wednesday on KCTS. It's a timely effort: curiosity about this country of 1.3 billion will only increase as the countdown to the 2008 Summer Olympics begins. And in a feat meant to be both thorough and intimate, the film takes on a range of issues, exploring the power and influence of the Communist Party; the lives of women; rapid industrialization and the environmental ramifications; and religious freedoms and social justice.

The footage is vast. Cameras traveled to Tibet; Xinjiang, home to many Muslims; the Kazakhstan border; the Gobi Desert; and the Yangtze River. There are interviews with women activists trying to instill self-confidence among rural women (to try to help stave off a high suicide rate); a National People's Congress delegate comparing communism with U.S. democracy; a Catholic priest practicing religion in an atheist country; and residents who've been displaced by the gargantuan construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

The Chinese, Lewis said in a telephone interview earlier this week from San Francisco, are keen on maintaining "China's face. There's a sense that you shouldn't expose weaknesses of the system. Airing-your-dirty-laundry sort of thing."

But Lewis also found an openness and an outspokenness among ordinary citizens and some party officials alike. There's the Chinese environmental official, for example, who is interviewed worrying about his country's imperiled natural resources. In that same episode, an environmental activist talks about the polluted Huai River, its cancer-inducing contaminants ravaging the lives of villagers whose photos he displays. In the segment about women, a factory worker in Guangdong Province talking about her day-to-day life: Working the assembly line and prohibited from talking between 6:08 a.m. and 6:08 p.m.

In 1999, Lewis, who lives in Oxford, wrote, directed and produced the four-part documentary "Hell in the Pacific" that looked at the 1937-38 Nanjing massacre by the Japanese. Lewis said that project helped convince the Chinese government that his new project would be handled sensitively. But in his initial meetings with officials he was explicit he wasn't going to shy away from any of myriad touchy subjects.

Lewis and his crew were accompanied by minders the entire time they filmed, which took place throughout 2005 and 2006. But at times, the filming appeared to bore their chaperones and so some left the crew by itself. Others turned a blind eye: When they learned about the next day's filming schedule they suddenly made an excuse that they wouldn't be able to go.

"We realized there were people all over the place that don't share this monolithic view of the country," Lewis said. "I watched this one minder seeing we were filming this very bad [polluted] site. He looked at me. He looked at what we were filming. And he walked into the bus. This person didn't want the issue ducked. He knew that's why we were there and that this was the story."

Filming in China included small acts of bribery. No one was paid to be interviewed, Lewis said, although the crew did have to pay to get access to Tibet and the people there.

The documentary series, a co-production by San Francisco's KQED Public Television and Europe's Granada Television, first aired in the United Kingdom, at which time Lewis sent a copy to the Chinese government, which had asked to see it before being broadcast. The Chinese reaction: none thus far.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com